Licenses determine what features and functionality a user will have, when using Spotfire. Features not enabled for a user will not appear in Spotfire for that user. For more details on which features are included in which license, please see Description of Groups and Licenses.
Licenses are always set for groups, never for individual users. When you, the administrator, create the groups needed for your company, you should also set which licenses apply to these groups. The idea is to create a hierarchy of groups, where you assign licenses as high up as possible. Licenses are inherited by the member groups below, and if you have specialized groups further down in the hierarchy, you can enable more advanced licenses for these groups in addition to the basic licenses they inherit.
Example 1:
The group ACME Spotfire Users contains all the users who use Spotfire. The administrator sets the Spotfire Analyst license for that group, which means all users will have access to the features included in that license.
Some users at ACME work with more advanced analysis, so they also need the features included in the Spotfire Advanced Analytics license in addition to the Spotfire Analyst license. The administrator creates a group called ACME Analysts and sets the Spotfire Advanced Analytics license for that group.
Realizing that he wants to split the analyst users into two subgroups, he does not assign any user to the ACME Analyst group, he instead creates two subgroups called ACME Food Analysis and ACME Drink Analysis to which he adds certain users. Users in either of these groups inherit the Spotfire Advanced Analytics license from the ACME Analysts group.
Since groups are used for more than licenses, the administrator can later on let the food analysts share their work in a certain library section, and the drink analysts can keep their work in a library section of their own.
Enabling and Disabling Features
Each license in Spotfire consists of a number of features. By default, if you enable a license all the features included in that license are also enabled. If you prefer, you can disable or enable individual features of a license. For example, perhaps some users should not have access to the Export Data tools. You can disable this particular feature for them while still keeping the other features included in the same license. Another example could be a group of users that never use the Map Chart and do not want to see this option in the menus.
Just like licenses, individual features are also inherited. However, it is important to note that disabling a feature for a group does not disable it for ALL groups using that license - it is only disabled for that particular group and its children.
Example 2:
The administrator has assigned the Spotfire Advanced Analytics license to both the ACME Sales Analysts group and the ACME Manufacturing Analysts group. However, he has disabled the Line Similarity Tool for the ACME Sales Analysts, but kept it enabled for the ACME Manufacturing Analysts.
Example 3:
The ACME administrator has assigned the Spotfire Analyst license to the ACME Spotfire Users group, but disabled the Import Data and Create Pie Chart features, since the average ACME user should not be allowed to do this. However, for the group ACME Drink Analysis, the administrator explicitly enables these two features since the users belonging to this group will need them to do their work. The users working with Food Analysis do not get these features; they only inherit the licenses and features from their parent group.
Inheritance
The basic rule to remember is that a user will get access to all the features that are enabled for any of the groups he is a member of. If a certain feature is enabled in one group, and disabled in another group, a user that is a member of both groups will get the feature. Once a license is inherited there is no way to disable it from another group, as licenses can only be cumulatively added by inheritance, not removed.
See also:
Description of Groups and Licenses